It’s far better than Slack’s search, which limits you to the last 10,000 messages unless you pay them a fee per member in your community.

This might change in the future as Discord tries to recoup their VCs' investment. See GitLab for a recent example.

GitLab is charging for metered compute minutes, which is hardly an unreasonable bargain for users who have been them for free for two years. Slack's feature-gating is disconnected from any unit economics - indeed, they actually do _store_ the messages prior to the most recent 10,000, but they just refuse to index them. The cost of that indexing is relatively minimal and does not scale linearly with number of users.

Doesn't matter what the technical justification is, it's a business move, not a tech move. It's about the customer's willingness to pay, and it looks like for Slack, companies are very willing to pay.

> But according to Butterfield, Slack is actually an acronym. It stands for: "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge."

https://www.businessinsider.com/where-did-slack-get-its-name...

Being better than Slack’s search doesn’t make it good.

The primary use case that we’re talking about is that someone has a common error, in which case they can put that error message into Discord search and read conversation about previous errors. Discord search is perfectly adequate for that use case.

That's fairly close to my use case for which Discord fails miserably.

But let's not get stuck on this point. There's a dozen other reasons why Discord shouldn't be used for technical forums

I don’t love that projects use discord now, but I don’t hate it either. Beyond the crappy search, what other reasons make discord a bad fit for technical forums? What’s your preferred solution?

My question was driven by the fact I don't have a preferred solution that would suit both technical and non-technical users.

But as for why Discord is a bad fit - it's completely opaque to search engines, it requires an invite, it has a fairly complex UI and it's basically "unstructured chat". Threads are an afterthought and don't come close to giving any proper structure.

I want chat for people that, you know, want to chat - but structured posts with topics and categories are needed for any sane, long term knowledge-base.

People on chat (this goes for IRC as well) will continually ask the same questions and you will continually have to answer them again because there's no structure.

The primary use case is actually googling the error, in which discord falls flat on it's face.

Every external chat room logs service I've seen has also had bad SEO, buggy, bad UI/UX, etc..